“Friendship means connection. And for that, you need to actually stay connected. You are nothing to me now, Kreya. I don’t think you understand that.Nothing.And so I will give you nothing.” She rose and crossed the room. Holding open the front door, she waited. Her expression looked, more than anything else, tired. And a little sad.
Kreya tried again. “It’s important.”
“To you. Not to me.”
“If you knew why...”
“Will you tell me?”
“I...” Kreya wanted to say the words:I can bring Jentt back! He can live again!But the words stuck in her throat. Could she trust Zera? Years ago, she would have said,Yes, no question, I trust her with my life. This wasn’t Kreya’s life, though; it was Jentt’s. Given Zera’s flair for theatrics, combined with the prohibition against using human bone for magic, she couldn’t guarantee that Zera wouldn’t immediately rush to the guild and kill any chance that Kreya ever had of restoring her husband. Or rushto her tower and destroy Jentt’s body. “I . . . can’t. I ask you . . . I beg you, in memory of the friendship we once had, to please help me.”
She couldn’t trust her with the truth, but Kreya would happily sacrifice her pride.
Gripping a skeletal pillar for support, Kreya lowered herself to the floor and knelt. “Please, Zera. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. I would have left you in peace—”
“You left me in war. That was worse.”
“I apologize. On my knees.”
Zera wrinkled her nose. “Yes, I see that. It’s pathetic. Stand up.”
Wincing as her back twinged, Kreya stood. “Zera. Please give me another chance.” Another chance at happiness. At hope. At the life she was supposed to have.
“You had your chance. We all did. And now it’s time for you to leave.”
Quick thoughts flashed through her head: she could beg more, explain more, try to overpower her, try to blackmail her, try to steal from her, but looking at Zera’s painted face, Kreya knew she’d do none of that. She’d find another way that didn’t involve her old friend.I’ve hurt her enough,Kreya thought.
She walked past her without a word and kept walking out of the fifth tier, out of Cerre, and did not stop until night fell on the mountains. Only then, in the darkness, did she stop and cry. Not for herself. Not for Jentt. But for Zera.
She had not realized until now that the war had also broken her best friend.
Chapter Four
Zera had her old nightmare, the one she’d banished many years ago, for the next three nights: She was back on the plain, facing Eklor’s army. Jentt was dead. Kreya was gone. Stran was using his talisman-fueled fists to pound soldier after soldier made of armor and bone. Marso was whimpering as he stabbed and slashed the smaller bone critters with his knife. And she was searching through the pockets of a coat she’d trashed long ago, the twin to the one Kreya still wore.
In reality, twenty-five years ago, Zera had drawn on her entire arsenal of talismans, supplying Stran and Marso as fast as they could use them, and all three of them had fought with the strength of a thousand bears and mountain lions combined. But in her dream, she could not find a single one. She searched, and her friends died beside her—sometimes Stran would be impaled by the antlers of a skeletal deer, sometimes Marso would be sliced across the sternum by a sword, more often he’d be cut to ribbons by one of Eklor’s bone-powered metal monstrosities. Sometimes Kreya would be there, bleeding at her feet and trying to form words that Zera could never quite make out. And sometimes Jentt would be just beyond reach, dying again and again as the army overwhelmed him.
It was, to say the least, an unpleasant dream.
She woke after each one drenched in sweat and screaming.
“Fuck me,” Zera said the third night.
“Gladly,” the naked man beside her said sleepily.
She ignored him, stood, and stretched her neck. She felt stiff and sore, as if she’d been fighting in her sleep. An odd feeling, since she hadn’t thrown a punch or held a knife in years. She’d seen no point in keeping up with the training that Kreya had insisted they all get.
She heard a harp strum. “Perhaps some music will relax you?” her lover offered.
“Make it appropriately melancholy.”
He played an arpeggio in a minor key and then shifted to an old tune, one about a goatherd who pined for the miller’s son. Or was this the one about the weaver who lost thirteen sons and six daughters in a series of implausible tragedies? She liked that one. Very gory. A death in each verse, followed by a lament. Sometimes it was refreshing to hear about someone who had suffered worse than you. He sang softly, his voice still a bit rough from sleep but pretty.
She listened for a while as she looked out her window at the stars over the mountain. On the sixth verse, she spoke. “Guine, what do you think Kreya needed my talismans for?”
The harp didn’t cease. Guine knew better than that. “She did not say?”
“She did not.”
